Microcode Solutions is one the oldest names in commercial Macintosh emulation. Before founding Microcode, company President and CEO Jim Drew spent time with a business called Utilities Unlimited International, creating, among other products, EMPLANT, a means of emulating the Macintosh computer on Amiga machines via hardware purchased from U.U.I. Drew describes the emplant hardware as "basically a MacII motherboard on an Amiga plug-in card."

When (as Drew alleges) EMPLANT code was illegaly utilized by Christian Bauer (who would later create Basilisk II) to create Shapeshifter, a shareware Mac-on-Amiga emulator, UUI was put out of business. Drew, however, continued his emulation work by founding "Microcode Solutions" on August 24 1996, with two of his co-workers, including programmer Joseph Fenton who is still with the company. Together, they developed "Fusion," a software-only (no costly hardware was required) Macintosh emulator for the Amiga system. Fusion was ported to x86 (PC) architecture and released as "Fusion-PC" in July of 1998. A demo version of the emulator was released soon afterward, and the official Microcode site logged over two million downloads of it in less than three years.

Though quite popular, initial releases of Fusion-PC ran solely in DOS, causing difficulty for many users. Later releases corrected this problem by giving Fusion the ability to run in a DOS window.

On May 23 2000, Jim Drew sold Fusion-PC to Darek Mihocka's "Emulators, Inc.," a rival company with a similarly long history in Macintosh emulation on various platforms. This move alienated many customers, as the business practices of Mihocka had been vocally opposed in online forums prior to the sale. Drew defended the move by saying that he could no longer afford to support an antiquated program while attempting to create an emulator of PPC Macintosh computers.

In April of 2001, Microcode Solutions released "iFusion," a software-only emulator of the PPC Macintosh for the Amiga computer. The company stated at that time that a port of iFusion (which will be renamed) to the Windows operating system was almost complete. Drew has indicated then that the initial port of iFusion would require hardware support (from a card that he would sell for ~$300 US), but that a software-only version would be released at a later date. Drew has since sold iFusion to a retailer called "Virtual Programming Limited" without releasing a Windows port.

In early 2002, Drew stated that the hardware supported Windows port of iFusion would be officially released at MacWorld Tokyo in March of that year. This deadline was not met, and Drew was criticized online for his error. Drew responded to the attacks by releasing pictures of the hardware card that he said would support the emulator. This did little to halt the attacks on his company and amidst legal threats against emulation site developers, the official Microcode Solutions site was removed and a message stating "NEW WEBSITE COMING SOON!" was put in its place. As of May 26, 2002 it has not been replaced.

At this time Microcode Solutions does not sell any products. iFusion Amiga is available from Virtual Programming, and Fusion (modified by Darek Mihocka) is available as a free download, with no shareware restrictions.

Required Reading

E-Maculation Interview with Jim Drew.
Letter from Christian Bauer to Jim Drew, re: Emplant, Basilisk

Links

Microcode Solutions Home
Blittersoft - to purchase Microcode products.

Files